Ex-guard of Ghetto in Poland Goes on Trial for Fifth Time in Germany

George Schlosser, 51, formerly a guard in the Czehstochova ghetto in Poland, went on trial today again as a war criminal. It is his fifth trial.

In 1959 he went on trial on charges of having killed a Jewish child, and was acquitted. The following year, after an appeal against the first verdict by the prosecution, he was tried a second time, was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment, but was released when a higher court cancelled the sentence. His third trial, scheduled to have been held in 1962, was postponed because some witnesses were unable to appear.

The fourth effort to bring him to justice resulted in the death sentence for having murdered a Jewish medical orderly, but again the highest court in Germany reversed the verdict on grounds that errors had crept into the proceedings.

(A Warsaw report today said that Stanislaw Bibinski, a Pole who served as a policeman during the Nazi regime, was sentenced in Poland to 15 years’ imprisonment at hard labor for killing Jews during the war period. The man was convicted at Bialystok of having murdered “a number of Jews” in the town of Kniszin. He was arrested recently after escaping detection for years by changing his home and occupation frequently.)

A large number of Nazi war criminals are at present standing trial in various towns in West Germany and many more are expected to be brought to justice at trials scheduled to open in the near future.

On November 14th, the so called “Small Auschwitz Trial” will begin in Frankfurt involving Wilhelm Burger, a former SS officer and administrative director of the Auschwitz death camp, and Josef Erber and Gerhard Neuber, former SS men who were defendants at the major Auschwitz trial held earlier this year but who were removed from the list because of illness.

A third Auschwitz trial will open in Frankfurt towards the end of 1965 according to an announcement by the Frankfurt Prosecutor’s office which is now preparing indictments against eight to 10 former SS men for their participation in the mass murder of Jews. At the same time 326 former guards and staff members of Auschwitz are being investigated for their roles in the atrocities and massacres carried out at the Nazi death camp.